Media Blog

Every website owner wants to reach as large of an audience as possible. That’s why good web developers go to pains to ensure their sites are standards compliant, work across all browsers and provide solid accessibility for devices like screen readers.

Unfortunately, while those are all steps in the right direction, none of them address a quite large subset of problematic users — the color blind.

Color blindness affects between five and ten percent of the general population. Most color blind humans are male, and the most common form of color blindness makes it difficult for the person to distinguish between reds and greens.

We’ll admit that we hadn’t fully considered the impact of color blindness on website design until Andy Biao of Waxy.org pointed us to We Are Color Blind. The site hosts a collection of design patterns for making your website more accessible to people with common forms of color blindness.

If you’re thinking this is simply another thing you need to worry about when picking color palettes and page designs, relax. The patterns on We Are Color Blind, aren’t complicated and the site is full of very easy, subtle solutions.

For example, consider Apple’s iPhone availability chart — a simple list with store locations alongside red and green dots to show which stores have iPhones and which don’t. The problem is that if you don’t see color, distinguishing between the red and green dots is very difficult. The solution, however, is very simple and elegant — change the red dots to red squares. The basic design of the site, and the color scheme, is maintained, but the difference in shapes allows color blind users to easily get the same information.

Other potentially problematic designs include pie charts, heat maps and color pickers. But as is the case with the iPhone chart, there are easy solutions. For example, with charts, heat maps and other color maps, simply adding a tooltip when the mouse hovers over a selection helps eliminate the color dependency.

Our favorite part about We Are Color Blind is that not only does it make you aware of a problem you might have previously overlooked, but it has thoughtful solutions all ready to go. We wish there were more collections of common design patterns and solutions out there; if you know of others be sure to let us know.

Note: The image at the top is a plate from the famous test developed by Shinobu Ishihara. Individuals will normal vision will see the number 74. Color blind individuals will see different numbers or no numbers at all depending on what type of color blindness they have. Learn more at Archimedes-lab.org and Wikipedia.

See Also:

• Why No One is Using Your Application or Website
• Usability Problems Users Hate Most
• OpenID Is Here. Too Bad Users Can’t Figure Out How It Works
• Google’s New Design Helps Eliminate OpenID Confusion

Flickr is now giving its users two new ways to add place information to their photos.

The photo sharing service can now recognize location-specific tags from both OpenStreetMap, a wiki-like mapping service that lets anyone create and edit maps, and FourSquare, the popular social game, currently burning up on Twitter, that lets you broadcast your location to friends.

While the new OpenStreetMap support in Flickr is not for everyone — something Flickr wryly acknowledges in a blog post titled “That’s maybe a bit too dorky, even for us” — the nice part is that, even if only a small subset of users ever take advantage of the new features, everyone benefits.

For example, you don’t need to know anything about OpenStreetMap or FourSquare to appreciate that a photo came from Fenway Park. That level of place data is far more useful than simply seeing a pin stuck on a map of Boston, which is all you get with Flickr’s own mapping tools.

To get the more meaningful details — like the names of buildings — Flickr has turned to both OpenStreetMap and FourSquare. The FourSquare support is nice, but since the service is newer and its coverage more limited, the real power of Flickr’s new abilities lie with the OpenStreetMap support.

OpenStreetMap is often called the Wikipedia of mapping services. It allows anyone to create, edit and annotate maps, adding their own knowledge of neighborhoods and building to generic map data like cities and streets. There has been a surge of interest in the service lately. Now that Flickr has embraced OpenStreetMap, we expect its popularity to continue growing as more curious users discover the ability to map and annotate their own little corners of the world.

For example, you could add all the buildings on your street, identifying each by what OpenStreetMap calls a node — a point in space defined by a latlong, a set of  geocoordinates defined by a latitude and a longitude. A collection of nodes becomes a street, a hiking trail or even just your personal route to work. OpenStreetMap calls these collections a “way.”

What Flickr has done is make it possible to easily link your photos to an OpenStreetMap “way” using Flickr’s machine tag syntax. The actual tag looks something like this: OpenStreetMap:way=XXXXXXX, where the Xs are replaced by the OpenStreetMap way number.

The tag itself is of little value to humans — that’s why its called a machine tag. But behind the scenes, Flickr turns that tag into a much more human-friendly description like “the Wired office is a building in OpenStreetMap,” and then links to its location in OpenStreetMap.

If that sounds a bit too nerdy for you, Flickr also now supports tagging your photos with FourSquare venue IDs. For example adding foursquare:venue=11784 will let Flickr know that your photo comes from Fenway Park, as shown in the screenshot above. FourSquare is increasingly popular, but it still only covers a limited number of cities. However, depending on how Twitter handles its coming geolocation support, it’s possible Flickr will one day add similar support for Twitter locations, should Twitter follow in FourSquare’s footsteps.

Flickr’s OpenStreetMap features are great example of taking the complexity of geodata and distilling it down to something genuinely helpful, like a familiar place name or neighborhood landmark. We’re looking forward to seeing what users can do with them.

See Also:

• Flickr Makes It Simple to Post Photos on Twitter
• OpenStreetMaps Project Takes Maps in a Different Direction
• ‘Tile Drawer’ Makes Hosting Your Own OpenStreetMap Server Dead Simple
• When It Comes to Friends, Flickr’s Had It Right All Along

Google Wave is opening up to the general public for the first time Tuesday, the company has announced.

Just over 100,000 invitations are being sent out to users who had previously requested access to the web-based real-time communications service on a first-come, first-served basis. Wave invites should be arriving in e-mail inboxes throughout Tuesday night and Wednesday day.

Google Wave is a web-based application that marries multiple forms of communication, including chat, mail and wikis, into a unified interface that runs in one browser window. Everything inside Wave happens in real time: You can even see a comment being made as the person is typing it, character by character.

Wave was soft-launched in May with a public demo at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco. Access was given only to early testers and developers at the time, however (We were lucky enough to be invited to give it a spin).

Wave solves a unique problem for web users as we deal with the proliferation of web-based collaboration tools and real-time communications services. On one side, you have cloud-based document sharing, photo sharing, wikis and other tools for collaboration. Then there are services built for real-time communication — chat is an obvious one, but other services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed (which Facebook purchased in August before releasing its code) also aim to make real-time sharing a bigger part of our online experience.

Efforts are ongoing to tie them all together, including the emerging Activity Streams data specification, which makes it easier for multiple real-time services to tell each other what users are posting or commenting on.

But each of these services and tools fills its own niche, and, for now at least, each occupies its own browser tab or, in Facebook’s case, its own section within a website. Wave is one of the only services trying to bring them all together into a unified interface.

“The observation that our communication lines are very fragmented — we’re certainly not the first ones to bring that up,” Wave engineering manager Lars Rasmussen tells Webmonkey.

And it’s also not a problem Rasmussen thinks his team can totally solve. However, he’s confident they will come close enough to make a huge impact on the emerging real-time web.

“Can you invent a single tool that has all the functionality of all the other tools? Maybe not. But in a year from now, we’ll have quite a lot of users who are in love with Wave even if it doesn’t completely handle everything they need for their communications.”

Tuesday’s release is not a general launch. Google is still pushing Wave out gently, so even though well over a million people have asked for access, Google is only honoring a fraction of the requests.

“We tried to invite a mix of people in enterprise, startups and schools,” Rasmussen says. He also says a very small number of paying Google Apps customers will be given access, and anyone involved in the developer tests over the summer will get to keep their access. The Wave team is based in Australia (the reason the launch is happening overnight in North America), and they made sure to give a higher priority to a few Aussie companies for now so they could collect some on-site, hands-on feedback.

Wave isn’t due for a real public launch until 2010. It’s still quite buggy, so Tuesday’s release is more akin to alpha or early beta software than a fully functional service.

“We wanted to give access only to people who have a high level of interest in dealing with preview-quality software,” Rasmussen says.

The team hasn’t been busy adding features. Rather, they feel the core functionality of Wave — the ability to replace things like long mail threads and online document sharing with real-time collaboration, sort of a “chat within e-mail” experience — holds enough value that they’ve simply been concentrating on improving the baseline performance.

“Latency is an obsession of ours,” says Rasmussen.

Some limitations within the browser are keeping Wave from running as quickly as he wants. When a Wave becomes long, for example, it can take awhile to open it. The team is working on a pre-loading system where you don’t have to load the whole Wave to start reading it or adding to it, just the first couple of pages. Then as you scroll, it keeps loading, speeding things up.

Another hang-up, one typical of young web applications, is that Wave slows down after you’ve used it for a few hours. This is due to memory leaks, and refreshing the browser page or restarting the browser solves it. But plugging those holes so browser refreshes aren’t necessary is the obvious goal.

There are two nice improvements in Tuesday’s launch.

First is that Wave is now tied to your regular Google account. Anyone who’s been involved in the sandboxed testing phase over the last few months has had to log in using a test account set up by Google. This account was kept isolated from your regular Google account, so you couldn’t use Wave to collaborate with any of your regular contacts. You could use Wave, but it was a little lonely.

Starting Tuesday, anyone with Wave access can now log in using their regular Google account. You’ll be able to communicate with any of your regular Google contacts who also have Wave access. You’ll also be given eight invitations each to hand out (Google’s calling them “nominations”). Anyone you invite gets put into the request queue.

The second improvement is a new system for installing add-ons. Developers have been busy building widgets that show off the real-time collaboration platform’s powers. Along with making those more accessible, Google has made installing them a simpler, two-click process.

Users will find a Sudoku game where you race against other people to fill in columns and rows in real-time, as well as a trip planner gadget developed by Lonely Planet.

Anyone running Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome will have few problems running Wave. Internet Explorer users who feel things to be a little janky or sluggish should try installing Google’s Chrome Frame extension for Microsoft’s browser.

See Also:

• Google Waves Goodbye to E-Mail, Welcomes Real-Time Communication
• New Google Plug-in Embeds Chrome Inside Internet Explorer
• Let’s Be Friends: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
• Facebook Open Sources ‘Tornado’ the Engine That Drives FriendFeed

Mozilla has added a feature to the coming Firefox 3.6 that will make it a bit easier to figure our why your friend’s web browser isn’t working. A new –about:support — configuration page in Firefox 3.6 is designed to make debugging and solving Firefox problems a little bit easier.

Firefox 3.6 (code named Namoroka) is still currently an alpha release and not stable enough to recommend for everyday use, but the Mozilla roadmap calls for the final version to arrive some time in November. When it does, the new about:support windows will make it dead simple to look up all the pertinent information about the current Firefox installation, including a list off all installed extensions, any user-modified preference setting, links to installed plugins and other configuration details.

The best part for those of us charged with trouble-shooting PCs for friends and family is that all the information inside the new about:support window can be copied by pressing a single (large) button. Your beleaguered, less-than-PC-savvy friends can paste the results in a chat window or e-mail and send you a wealth of information without you needing to spend hours explaining what extensions are and where to find them.

The new about:support window will be a boon to those trying to manage Firefox — and we don’t just mean you helping grandma when you’re home for Thanksgiving.

If you’ve ever wondered why much of the corporate IT world has stuck with IE 6, the answer is that IE 6, for all its other faults is much easier to manage when it comes to installing and updating thousands of workstations. There are some open source tools designed to help IT pros deploy and manage Firefox (notably Firefox ADM), but Mozilla has never shown much interest in making Firefox more enterprise-friendly.

While the new about:support window is a far cry from everything IT managers would from Firefox, it is a welcome (if tiny) step in the right direction.

Eventually, Mozilla would like to add self-diagnostic and repair tools to the about:support page, but such tools won’t arrive until after Firefox 3.6.

Firefox 3.6 is still an alpha release, so some aspects of the about:support window are still up in the air — particularly whether or not the profile folder location should be revealed. The Firefox profile folder is obscure and randomly named precisely to make it hard to find. Doing so prevents attackers from easily accessing it. Exposing that information in about:support could possibly make Firefox more vulnerable to attack, thus Mozilla does not seem to have made a final decision about including it.

Mozilla is hoping to get Firefox 3.6 out a bit more quickly than its last release, Firefox 3.5, which was delayed several times before it finally arrived in June 2009. Look for Firefox 3.6 beta 1 to arrive any day and, if all goes well, the final release should be here by the end of 2009.

See Also:

• Mozilla Shows What’s to Come in Firefox 3.6 Alpha Release
• Reach Out and Touch the Web With Firefox’s Coming Multitouch Support
• Mozilla Mulls Design Makeover for Firefox 3.7

Google Maps has a new trick up its sleeve — a web page for every place on Earth.

The new “Place Pages,” as Google is calling them, are individual web pages designed to give you all the information Google has about a particular place, including geotagged photos and videos, user reviews, popular places and related searches.

Unfortunately, there’s a huge downside to the new Place Pages: They ruin your ability to quickly and easily compare Google Maps search results.

In a blog entry posted Thursday, Google claims it eventually wants to have a web page for every place in the world — businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities. The new pages are useful if you’re searching for more than just an address, and in fact they make Google Map searches more like browsing a travel guide using than a search tool.

The problem is that Google Maps has changed the behavior of the “more info” links in search results. Previously, a “more info” link would open a bubble on the map with more details about that location or business. Clicking the next “more info” link in your results would re-center the map on the next result, and so on down the list. It was a quick and easy way to, for example, compare customer reviews for multiple locations.However, the new Place Pages have usurped the more info link. Now, if you click “more info,” you leave the search results page behind. The new behavior works well for destinations, but not so well if you’re trying to compare results since you need to keep hitting the back button to get back to the list of results.

On the plus side, unlike Google Maps URLs, which tend to be a long tangle of characters, Place Pages get nice, human-readable URLs. For example: google.com/places/us/california.

Google has also made Place Pages user-editable, so if you think Google is misrepresenting your hometown, you can correct it. And, if there’s no Place Page for your favorite place, you can always add it.

While Place Pages are actually quite useful and in many ways better than the old bubbles on the map, losing the “more info” link was a bad decision, hopefully one Google will correct in the future.

See Also:

• Google Maps Redesign Puts ‘Street View’ Front and Center
• Google Maps V3 Offers Easier, Faster API
• Google Maps Adds User Mashups

The latest version of Opacity, a vector graphics editor for Mac OS X, is able to export animations to code that can be pasted into web pages and played back in any browser that supports HTML5.

We’ve written quite a bit about HTML5 and  the power of its proposed <canvas> tag. While the spec isn’t quite finished, the Canvas element in HTML5 promises to eventually give web developers a way to display complex 3-D graphic animations in the browser without plug-ins. Right now, the dominant technologies for doing so are proprietary players like Flash and Silverlight.

There is, however, a trade-off. Canvas-based animations must be written in pure code, and most easy-to-use graphics creation applications like Adobe Flash can’t export the browser-ready animation code, which is complex. Such a limitation is going to put off some of the most talented graphic designers and animators, many of whom are not trained programmers.

That’s why we were excited to hear that Opacity’s new capability to save animated vector shapes and their paths as browser-native code.

Opacity is a bit like Adobe Illustrator, but considerably simpler and easier to use. And with its new export feature, Opacity has a clear leg up on Illustrator when it comes to supporting the next generation of web graphics.

To use the new source code feature in Opacity, simply design your vector-based graphic or animation sequence and, once you’re happy with it, head to the Inspector menu where you can use what Opacity refers to as “Factories” to export your image in various formats. To get Canvas-based source code, chose Source Code for the format and Canvas (JavaScript) as the language.

The resulting JavaScript code looks almost exactly like the examples we’ve shown you in the past (if you don’t own a license for Opacity, which costs between $40 and $90, your image will be watermarked).

We should note that there are other tools around that can do similar things with just an image file — such as Alistair MacDonald’s Burst engine, which can take SVG animations and convert them to JavaScript objects that are rendered inside of a <canvas> tag.

Opacity is a Mac OS X application and costs $90 — not cheap, but cheaper than than Adobe Illustrator. There’s also a lighter version known as Opacity Express, which still has the code export option, but lacks some other features and retails for $40.

See Also:

• Firefox With WebGL Brings Powerful 3-D Graphics to the Web
• Using HTML5 Today With Modernizr
• How HTML 5 Is Already Changing the Web

The latest version of Opacity, a vector graphics editor for Mac OS X, is able to export animations to code that can be pasted into web pages and played back in any browser that supports HTML5.

We’ve written quite a bit about HTML5 and  the power of its proposed <canvas> tag. While the spec isn’t quite finished, the Canvas element in HTML5 promises to eventually give web developers a way to display complex 3-D graphic animations in the browser without plug-ins. Right now, the dominant technologies for doing so are proprietary players like Flash and Silverlight.

There is, however, a trade-off. Canvas-based animations must be written in pure code, and most easy-to-use graphics creation applications like Adobe Flash can’t export the browser-ready animation code, which is complex. Such a limitation is going to put off some of the most talented graphic designers and animators, many of whom are not trained programmers.

That’s why we were excited to hear that Opacity’s new capability to save animated vector shapes and their paths as browser-native code.

Opacity is a bit like Adobe Illustrator, but considerably simpler and easier to use. And with its new export feature, Opacity has a clear leg up on Illustrator when it comes to supporting the next generation of web graphics.

To use the new source code feature in Opacity, simply design your vector-based graphic or animation sequence and, once you’re happy with it, head to the Inspector menu where you can use what Opacity refers to as “Factories” to export your image in various formats. To get Canvas-based source code, chose Source Code for the format and Canvas (JavaScript) as the language.

The resulting JavaScript code looks almost exactly like the examples we’ve shown you in the past (if you don’t own a license for Opacity, which costs between $40 and $90, your image will be watermarked).

We should note that there are other tools around that can do similar things with just an image file — such as Alistair MacDonald’s Burst engine, which can take SVG animations and convert them to JavaScript objects that are rendered inside of a <canvas> tag.

Opacity is a Mac OS X application and costs $90 — not cheap, but cheaper than than Adobe Illustrator. There’s also a lighter version known as Opacity Express, which still has the code export option, but lacks some other features and retails for $40.

See Also:

• Firefox With WebGL Brings Powerful 3-D Graphics to the Web
• Using HTML5 Today With Modernizr
• How HTML 5 Is Already Changing the Web

If you’d like to see what the next generation of 3-D web graphics might look like, Mozilla has a few examples ready for you to feast your eyes on.

Mozilla’s WebGL project gives web developers a way to connect the HTML5 Canvas element, which can be used to display complex graphics in the browser without plug-ins like Flash, to your operating system’s native, hardware-accelerated graphics engine — in this case, OpenGL.

While these capabilities point to a bright future for HTML5 and its promise of delivering animated, rich-media web experiences without plug-ins, Mozilla’s WebGL rendering tools aren’t ready for prime time. At the moment, WebGL support is limited to Firefox nightly builds, beginning with the September 18 build. To see any of these demos in action you’ll need to grab a nightly build.

The first WebGL example comes from Christopher Blizzard, an Open Source Evangelist at Mozilla. Blizzard exported a Spore creature, and used WebGL’s API to render it as a 3-D model that you can rotate around, viewing it from different angles.

Blizzard also has some links to three other demos showing off some 3-D effect in WebGL. The most hypnotic is the rotating charcoal drawing showing the Escher-Droste effect (infinite zooming the always reveals the same scene).

If you don’t want to install an experimental browser build just to see some cool visuals, here’s a short video. This is a basic capture of the Escher-Droste animation playing in browser window — no plug-ins, no special dressing:

Although testing all three demos at once did spin up the fan on my MacBook Pro, the CPU load for Minefield (Firefox’s nickname for nightly builds) never got above 50 percent, which is very impressive for graphics this complex.

The ability to display complex 3-D graphics without seizing up your PC bodes well for a whole new crop of online games. But the new WebGL support in the Firefox nightly builds is very much in the alpha testing stage. In other words, don’t look for your favorite online games to rush to adopt WebGL tomorrow.

However, as developers start to experiment with the new tools we’ll likely get a sneak peek at how HTML5 can push the boundaries of what’s possible on the web for 3-D animations interfaces without using Flash, Silverlight or any other plug-ins.

See Also:

• Firefox With WebGL Brings Powerful 3-D Graphics to the Web
• Using HTML5 Today With Modernizr
• How HTML 5 Is Already Changing the Web

Goby is new search engine designed to help you find something to do. The site searches across hundreds of websites and pulls in thousands of results pointing to local music happenings, museums, activities, sports games, entertainment events and restaurants.

Goby searches through events databases from big sites like Upcoming, Eventful and Yahoo Local to smaller ones like museum sites, hiking guides and hundreds more, combining all the relevant results in one list of search results.

The results are impressive, whether applied to your hometown or a vacation destination. In fact, Goby’s local search engine is possibly the best we’ve ever used.

Part of what makes Goby smarter than a typical Google search also makes it slightly more complicated. Rather than simply searching for terms, Goby asks you a series of questions: what do you want to do, where do you want to do it and when? The minimalist home page invites you to start a query by filling in three blank boxes, but Goby quickly jumps in, suggesting search terms and asking you to point to an area of focus on a map or pick a date range from a pop-up calendar.

However, while the initial search process might be a tad more complex, the results are well worth it. Once it has your input, Goby trolls through a vast index of information, pulling out events and destinations in your area for the time period you selected.

It’s worth noting that the results aren’t necessarily ranked. As Goby CEO Mark Watkins tells Webmonkey, that’s by design.

“We’re not trying to take an editorial view that says result A is better than result B,” says Watkins. Rather, Goby’s goal is to “surface up the information so that you can make the most of your free time, based on your own criteria.”

Depending on your search, Goby’s results can be rather extensive, which means you could use up a good part of your free time just sifting though your options. Fortunately, while Goby may not rank, it does have plenty of time and distance filters that make it easy to narrow things down to a specific area or a start time to help you find something you like.

For example a search for “live music” in Athens, GA this weekend returned results from Jambase.com, Last.fm, Culture Mob, Upcoming, Eventful and a bunch of other sites. The aggregation of various outside resources created by far the single most complete list of live music in Athens that I’ve seen online (sadly, good local web search is something sorely lacking in Athens).

Goby isn’t just about music. There are plenty of other options — everything from outdoor activities to museums to ball games. And the results were very good for just about everything I tried. A search for hiking trails in the “North Georgia mountains” pulled in 250 trails from dozens of websites.

One great feature that isn’t immediately obvious is the “distance radius” filter on Goby’s map tool. It allows you to quickly narrow results to, for example, within a half mile of your house or within 25 miles of the hotel you’ll be staying in.

Of course, Goby isn’t perfect. Aggregating data from numerous sources as Goby does means that your results will have a number of duplicates — the same music event listed on both Upcoming and Eventful will show up twice in Goby’s list. It’s a little annoying. I’d like to see Goby filter and combine duplicates, but it’s not a deal breaker.

Watkins rightly points out that because each result leads back to a different source, there is different data to be found in each result. For example, in the screenshot above, clicking though to both the listings would get different sets of user perspective and comment. For the launch, Watkins says Goby wanted to “preserve those perspectives,” though he says that Goby is still working out how to handle duplicate results.

The most frustrating thing about Goby is that it lacks RSS feeds. Call us spoiled, but Everyblock has conditioned us to believe that every filterable chunk of data deserves a feed.

Of course, in some cases, RSS feeds on Goby wouldn’t make sense. But a recurring search like “live music in my town tomorrow night” would be the perfect thing to drop in your feed reader so you’ll always know about upcoming shows. For now, you’ll have to do without the RSS feeds, though Watkins says Goby is “certainly thinking about them, along with many other ideas.”

I should also note that, at the moment Goby is limited to the United States. But if you’re looking for something to do inside the U.S., Goby is one of the best places to find it.

See Also:

• EveryBlock Launches Hyper-local News Service for Big Cities
• OpenStreetMaps Project Takes Maps in a Different Direction
• Google News Goes Local With Neighborhood Headlines

Goby is new search engine designed to help you find something to do. The site searches across hundreds of websites and pulls in thousands of results pointing to local music happenings, museums, activities, sports games, entertainment events and restaurants.

Goby searches through events databases from big sites like Upcoming, Eventful and Yahoo Local to smaller ones like museum sites, hiking guides and hundreds more, combining all the relevant results in one list of search results.

The results are impressive, whether applied to your hometown or a vacation destination. In fact, Goby’s local search engine is possibly the best we’ve ever used.

Part of what makes Goby smarter than a typical Google search also makes it slightly more complicated. Rather than simply searching for terms, Goby asks you a series of questions: what do you want to do, where do you want to do it and when? The minimalist home page invites you to start a query by filling in three blank boxes, but Goby quickly jumps in, suggesting search terms and asking you to point to an area of focus on a map or pick a date range from a pop-up calendar.

However, while the initial search process might be a tad more complex, the results are well worth it. Once it has your input, Goby trolls through a vast index of information, pulling out events and destinations in your area for the time period you selected.

It’s worth noting that the results aren’t necessarily ranked. As Goby CEO Mark Watkins tells Webmonkey, that’s by design.

“We’re not trying to take an editorial view that says result A is better than result B,” says Watkins. Rather, Goby’s goal is to “surface up the information so that you can make the most of your free time, based on your own criteria.”

Depending on your search, Goby’s results can be rather extensive, which means you could use up a good part of your free time just sifting though your options. Fortunately, while Goby may not rank, it does have plenty of time and distance filters that make it easy to narrow things down to a specific area or a start time to help you find something you like.

For example a search for “live music” in Athens, GA this weekend returned results from Jambase.com, Last.fm, Culture Mob, Upcoming, Eventful and a bunch of other sites. The aggregation of various outside resources created by far the single most complete list of live music in Athens that I’ve seen online (sadly, good local web search is something sorely lacking in Athens).

Goby isn’t just about music. There are plenty of other options — everything from outdoor activities to museums to ball games. And the results were very good for just about everything I tried. A search for hiking trails in the “North Georgia mountains” pulled in 250 trails from dozens of websites.

One great feature that isn’t immediately obvious is the “distance radius” filter on Goby’s map tool. It allows you to quickly narrow results to, for example, within a half mile of your house or within 25 miles of the hotel you’ll be staying in.

Of course, Goby isn’t perfect. Aggregating data from numerous sources as Goby does means that your results will have a number of duplicates — the same music event listed on both Upcoming and Eventful will show up twice in Goby’s list. It’s a little annoying. I’d like to see Goby filter and combine duplicates, but it’s not a deal breaker.

Watkins rightly points out that because each result leads back to a different source, there is different data to be found in each result. For example, in the screenshot above, clicking though to both the listings would get different sets of user perspective and comment. For the launch, Watkins says Goby wanted to “preserve those perspectives,” though he says that Goby is still working out how to handle duplicate results.

The most frustrating thing about Goby is that it lacks RSS feeds. Call us spoiled, but Everyblock has conditioned us to believe that every filterable chunk of data deserves a feed.

Of course, in some cases, RSS feeds on Goby wouldn’t make sense. But a recurring search like “live music in my town tomorrow night” would be the perfect thing to drop in your feed reader so you’ll always know about upcoming shows. For now, you’ll have to do without the RSS feeds, though Watkins says Goby is “certainly thinking about them, along with many other ideas.”

I should also note that, at the moment Goby is limited to the United States. But if you’re looking for something to do inside the U.S., Goby is one of the best places to find it.

See Also:

• EveryBlock Launches Hyper-local News Service for Big Cities
• OpenStreetMaps Project Takes Maps in a Different Direction
• Google News Goes Local With Neighborhood Headlines